I have an old $5 in my wallet, will be fun to do. The enjoyment I get out of doing this is easily worth $5.The bank listed "important reasons". I call BS on each one.- Reduced lifespan, so what? It is being replaced anyway.- It might be rejected in a transaction. Lame, someone else will take it. Its only $5- Source of national pride. Really? My guess is half of Canadians have never heard of him or know he was the PM.Checked my wallet, there is an old $5, jackpot! I am feeling more Canadian pride in doing this on a Canadian bill then... putting maple syrup on my bacon.

As a fellow geek I took to bookbinding in the late 90s to balance out the high tech I was involved in. I'd recommend you get a custom blank book made for your daughter. A few of your words written down in the book will be a source of comfort and joy that will last a lifetime. Years later people come to me and tell me that they are keeping track of things, using it in some way that makes me feel lucky to be a part of their lives. Your daughter will write things and draw things in this book and it will be something from you that she will treasure. You can get it personalized it some meaningful way. For my nieces and nephews, I have found their favorite colour, animal, a favorite shirt, and made it from that. In my own journals I will draw an outline of the hand, and you could do that your in the book to her. In our high tech world, something physical like a book is a good thing. Best wishes.

Schrodinger's duck writes: Ars Technica looks at some of the hype surrounding tomorrow's expected demonstration of a 16-bit quantum computer by Canadian start-up D-Wave. 'D-Wave's demos will show Orion crunching through a database search and handling a seating plan with a large number of constraints, such as you might find at a wedding reception. It's probably safe to say that, despite any of the doubts about the company, Orion will almost certainly show a major speed advance when applied to these two problems. But, given the limitations and questions, and the fact that D-Wave doesn't appear to currently be hurting for money, why are they bothering?' Ars' science journal, Nobel Intent, also has a pair of companion articles explaining Adiabatic Quantum Computing, the method used by D-Wave, and the P vs. NP problem in computational science.

Tony Bradley writes: "There are plenty of spyware and malware programs out there that will hijack your default home page or search engine. Antivirus and anti-spyware software will typically identify and block such attempts because they are illegal, or at least unethical. Imagine my dismay then when my default Web browser search engine was hijacked...by my ISP!! I did some investigating and found that they rationalized their browser hijacking by calling it an opt in "feature". The problem is that they opted everyone in by default and never gave users the opportunity to choose. I also discovered that this "service" only seems to apply if you use Microsoft's search engine. If you are a Google or Yahoo user, apparently you don't need to be forced to opt in to Charter's new "feature". Check out my walk-through of my investigation into this browser hijacking, complete with screen shots to illustrate the story.
http://netsecurity.about.com/od/webbrowsersecurity /ss/charterhijack.htm"

Roland Piquepaille writes: "UCLA chemists have built a molecular Solomon's knot at the nanoscale. The Solomon's knot is composed of two rings that interlace each other four times, with alternating crossing points that go over, under, over and under as one traces around each of the rings. This nano-version is roughly 2 nanometers high by 1.2 nanometers wide. And what would it be useful for? The project's leader offers a refreshing answer: "There is often a connection between the beauty and elegance of a chemical structure and its potential usefulness, and this Solomon knot structure is quite beautiful and elegant." Good luck to her! Read more for additional details and a picture."

Tarmas writes: "For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu's ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD sporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11."

DotNM writes: "This article from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reports that the Canadian government is considering revising the copyright law in Canada. These revisions include removing the fair use rights that Canadians enjoy. Will recording a TV show to watch later or ripping your CDs to MP3s become a crime in Canada?"

Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday January 14, 2007 @10:28AM
from the hate-when-that-happens dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In the standard definition of RSS 0.91, there are a couple of lines referring to 'DOCTYPE' and referencing a 'dtd' spec hosted on Netscape's website. According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the web probably stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file. Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft."Some explanation has been offered by a Netscape employee.